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IAEA documents military activity near all Ukraine’s nuclear sites
Military activity has been reported near all Ukraine’s operating nuclear power plants: Khmelnytskyy, Rivne, and South Ukraine, and the Chornobyl site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). IAEA teams recorded more than 100 drones within observation zones around nuclear facilities over the past two weeks, with some as close as 2 kilometers from the facilities.
The Chornobyl drone strike landed at a centralized spent-fuel storage facility in the exclusion zone, just hundreds of meters from where spent nuclear fuel from Ukrainian operating reactors is kept in containers.
“Attacking a facility with large amounts of nuclear material is extremely dangerous. It must not happen,” IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said.
What happened at Zaporizhzhia NPP on 30 May
On 30 May 2026, a drone struck the turbine hall of Unit 6 at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia NPP.
During subsequent inspections, IAEA specialists documented a hole in the wall and local damage to the metal cladding of an empty pipe located several meters from the impact point.
Experts are continuing to assess the condition of the affected area and the potential consequences of the incident.
“This is the first time since April 2024 that military activity has directly impacted the ZNPP site,” Grossi said.
ZNPP has been under Russian military occupation since March 2022 and remains a continuous focus of IAEA monitoring. The IAEA statement does not attribute the drone strike to either Russia or Ukraine.
Legal frame: Geneva Convention Article 56 protection
Nuclear power plants and similar installations containing dangerous forces are explicitly protected under Article 56 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits attacks that may release dangerous forces and cause severe losses among the civilian population.
The IAEA does not formally categorize incidents at Ukrainian nuclear sites as war crimes within this framework, which would require a UN Commission of Inquiry or ICC finding. The IAEA's role is technical and monitoring-focused.
